Category Archives: Culture

Between Barbarians and Fanatics

Posted on by
158

For most of human existence, the great conflict was between ordered civilization and chaotic barbarism. The Bronze Age societies had to contend with barbarians from the north. The Greeks and Romans had to deal with various barbarian tribes to their north and east. Medieval Europe had to deal with the Viking raiders and the Mongol invaders from the east. Then there were the Muslim invasions from the South that threatened Christendom. The story of the West has been the story of fighting barbarians.

By the time the West reached the Enlightenment, barbarian invasion was a thing of the past. In fact, it was inconceivable. The Nordic people were just as settled as the rest of Europe. Their days of raiding and pillaging were over. The idea of Asian tribes crossing through Russian into Europe was equally ridiculous. Of course, the Muslims had been beaten back and were no longer a threat. In fact, it was the West that was now heading south into the Middle East and Africa. The barbarians were no longer an issue.

Instead of organizing to keep the barbarians from coming over the horizon, it was the West sailing over the horizon to conquer the barbarians. The thing is though, all those years of organizing to defend civilization from the barbarians, however one wants to define the terms, meant a degree of internal vigilance. There could be no tolerance of internal actors and actions that weakened the social and political structures. Civilization was a near run thing so anything that weakened the West internally could not be tolerated.

The Catholic Church gets a bad rap for being intolerant of science during the Middle Ages, but that’s mostly left-wing nonsense. In an age when dissent could pull the support posts out from society, intolerance of troublemakers made a lot of sense. Of course, from the perspective of the secular rulers, a theological consistency, one that supported the order atop which they presided, was seen as essential. Anything that threatened the internal logic of the social order, even unintentionally, had to be treated very seriously.

That meant an extreme intolerance of religious fanatics. The post the other day about the Flagellants is a good example. The Church and secular rulers suppressed the movement because their fanaticism threatened order, by questioning the legitimacy of the Church. After all, if God was punishing people with the plague, that implied the Church was not on good terms with the Almighty. Throw in the fact the Flagellants were preaching about a coming age of bliss and it is easy to see why the Church suppressed them.

The point is, the West was good at policing the ranks for fanatics, because they had no choice. The very real threat from beyond the borders coupled with the fragility of the feudal order meant anyone coloring outside the lines was a mortal threat. As the alien threats receded, the need to impose a uniform intellectual order receded with it. While it resulted in a great intellectual flourishing in the West, it also let all the fanatics off their leash. The result is the West has been convulsed by fanaticism since the Enlightenment.

That’s how you have to look at radical ideologies like Marxism. These theories defy observable reality and imagine something that has never existed. There’s simply no way for a sober minded person to accept the idea of the worker’s paradise. Only a true believer is willing to commit their life to something that has never existed on earth. It is the same cognitive tool set that allows someone to think they can appeal directly to God or conjure miracles, simply because they believe. The fanatic is the fuel of radicalism.

In The Inequality of Man, the great natural scientist J. B. S. Haldane argued that fanaticism was a Judaic-Christian invention. That’s most certainly wrong, but he was not wrong to think it had been a feature of mankind for a long time. It is the fuel that drives a people to build a great culture. As we saw in the last century and now in our present age, it is also the fuel of great raging destruction. Other than allowing the rage of the fanatics to run its course, no one has yet to come up with a way to meet the challenge of the true believer.

That really is the challenge of this age. Lacking anything resembling a unified religion, our overabundance of fanatics are free to indulge in whatever is handy. One minute they are threatening order if gays are not allowed to marry. The next minute they are tearing down the borders, inviting in the barbarians our ancestors pushed over the horizon. It’s as if some strange mind virus is sweeping our societies, turning the afflicted into berserkers, beyond the reach of reason. As a result we edge closer and closer to collapse.

What’s happening in America, at least, is a replay of what happened in the Pennsylvania colony at the founding. The eastern part of the state was home to many fanatics, convinced they were part a project to immanentize the eschaton. To the west were the borderland people, living in the hills as pre-settled people. In between was where the civilized people lived, just looking to live peaceful, orderly lives. Eventually the middle aligned with the east to keep the hillbillies in the west from overrunning the middle.

To a great degree, this was true for the country as a whole. The emotional energy of the crazies, mostly located in the northeast, fueled the expansion across the continent. The Indians never stood a chance, not because of technology, but because the pale face was driven by a sense of destiny. It powered the northern conquest of the South and the expansion of America into a global power. It came with a price. Just as Pennsylvania is still dominated by Philadelphia, America remains captive to the Northern crazies.

That said, geography kept the crazies on their leash into the 20th century, with the exception of the Northern invasion of the South. As technology made it possible for the fanatics to extend their reach into every corner of the country, the threat of nuclear annihilation forced a degree of discipline on the elites. With that gone, the fanatics were free to run wild, pulling at every support beam and cable they can find. That’s where we find ourselves today. There are no barbarians at the walls, just our own fanatics.

If the West in general and American in particular, is going to survive this age, it will mean coming up with a way to control the fanatic. Perhaps it will mean finding a DNA test to look for the lunacy gene or simply change the culture to fear fanaticism. We were once willing to do what had to be done to ward off the barbarian.  Maybe we learn how to cull our herd in order to remove the crazies, no matter how unpleasant. Civilization lies between the barbarian and the fanatic. Both must be tamed if we are to survive.

The New Flagellants

Posted on by
119

Flagellation is the beating of the body with special implements such as whips, lashes, rods, the cat o’ nine tails, etc. Usually it was done involuntarily, but in the medieval period it became a voluntary form of penance. The Benedictine monk Peter Damian is credited with introducing self-flagellation as a form of penance in the 11th century. Later, an Italian monk named Dominic Loricatus introduced self-flagellation as a form of self-mortification, which when performed in public, also became a public demonstration of piety.

The Flagellants were a 14th century movement, that sprung up in response to the black plague. These fanatics would parade through the streets beating themselves bloody in an effort to cleanse the town of sin. It was assumed that the plague was the result of sin, so the cleaning of sin would, presumably, please God enough for him to end the plague. The movement started in northern Italy, but quickly spread to Germany. There they took on the white robes and rhythmic chanting that has come to be associated with the movement.

The Church initially tolerated the movement, but soon realized that fanatics are worse than barbarians in times of trouble, so they suppressed the movement. Secular rulers were not all that thrilled with them either, as anyone claiming to appeal directly to God is an obvious challenge to earthly authority. Compounding matters, many of the flagellant groups were influenced by messianic ideas about the coming age of bliss. As a result, the Church condemned them and the secular rulers had them burned at the stake to make the point.

While the movement is long gone, the idea is still with us. The link between piety and self-denial has probably been a part of human society since the beginning. Holy men have walled themselves off from society and earthly pleasures, as a sign of their piety, but also as a way of avoiding temptation. Prophets have given up all earthy pleasures in order to warn society of their doom. In the West, self-denial has always been closely tied to piety, while pleasure, especially carnal pleasure, is associated with sin.

This is most obvious in the climate change movement, which blends Old Testament prophecy with pagan nature worship. The true believers are sure that man’s hedonistic exploitation of the environment is making the earth angry. The result is rising global temperatures, which will lead to an apocalypse. When Al Gore said the earth had a fever, he did not mean it like an infection. Instead, the fever is due to the earth becoming increasingly angry as human activity. Earth is boiling mad, so to speak.

The first iteration of the cult focused on energy. The earth was angry because humans were using fossil fuels. On the surface, it sounded like the old environmentalism dressed up as a science. The greens always hated industry. A key part of environmentalism has always been a hostility to modernity, particularly industry, which was viewed as immoral and at odds with nature. By going after fossil fuel because of global warming, they were turning their moral opposition to modernity into a scientific claim.

Lately, the movement has shifted away from their claims about fossil fuels, which went nowhere with the public, to attacking other modern pleasures. A recent “study” claims that modern farming is making the earth angry, so we will have to stop eating tasty food and switch to a diet heavy on unpleasant stuff. That means sharp reductions in meat eating and dairy, while sharply increasing our consumption of beans, seeds and gruel. The promise of this approach is it now gives vegetarianism the veneer of science.

You’ll note that vegetarianism was never about health. Spend five minutes with a vegan and they will, of course, have told you they are a vegan, but make it clear they are better than you because they no longer enjoy their food. That age old desire to please the gods by eschewing earthly pleasures. Now that the warmists have joined in, a meal of grass and twigs is not just a personal act of piety. It is a sacrifice for the planet. The only thing missing is a good beating with a cat o’ nine tails, along with that soy burger.

Mencken famously said that Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. That’s a good way of describing all forms of environmentalism. They never come forward with a plan to save the earth that does not require misery. Of course, it’s not their misery that haunts them. Environmentalism is focused on your misery. The vegan is no longer happy being smug and self-righteous with his kale juice. He demands the state force you to drink the stuff. Their piety heavily depends on your misery.

Like everything else about this age, the Gaia worshipers are not appealing to the gods, but to our rulers. In an age where the state is worshiped, it is no wonder that it fills the role of God for the modern flagellants. The thing is, unlike the flagellants of old, the new version is not appealing to God for relief on our behalf. They are demanding the god of this age punish us for our sins. Instead of the faithful whipping themselves to a bloody pulp in the town square in order to appease God, their piety requires them to whip us.

Time to bring back burning them at the stake.

Travelogue: Normieville

Posted on by
131

I’ve been traveling this week to the lands where the great white normie is most common, which means the Midwest and southwest. If you don’t travel much or your travel is limited to the coasts, it is easy to forget that America is a big country with a diverse culture. As I’m fond of saying, it is a mansion with many rooms. Even though we have a lot in common, there are a lot of differences between the regions. Put another way, we already had all the diversity we needed. There was no reason to import more of it.

Unlike the coasts, the Midwest and southwest is where you can still find lots of heritage America and lots of heritage Americans. In the upper Midwest, there is an early 1960’s vibe to things that you don’t get on the coast. I’m speaking culturally, not technologically or materially. They have all the same stuff everyone else has. The Southwest has the old Mex-American – Western culture, but layered over it is the Midwest culture that reflects the people who moved there by the millions the last few decades.

The result for me this week was like stepping back in time. That’s not to say these people are throwbacks. It’s just that the echoes of old America can still be heard when socializing and even doing business. They still trade business cards at conferences and enjoy wearing name tags. They will walk right up to you and start using your name, having read it off your name tag. There is a genuineness about the people of the Midwest you rarely see on the coasts these days. It’s all very wholesome and normal…

I did a little drinking with a guy from Minnesota, who spent a considerable amount of time telling me about the softball team he sponsors. His daughter used to play on the team, but he continued to sponsor the team after she moved on. He sounded like a character from the movie Fargo, so it added to the old world charm. I could not help but wonder why anyone thought thought this sort of community spirit needed to be replaced with the crude transactionalism of cosmopolitan globalism, but then I remembered who was behind it…

I was amused in the airport over the weekend by the people watching the Kavanaugh vote on the big television screens. The airport is a good reminder that very few people watch CNN and that most people ignore politics. The big screen had a few young single women watching the vote, one was in tears. A smaller screen had the Texas – Oklahoma football game on and it was surrounded by people cheering the game. It’s a nice reminder that to most people, these events are not all that important or emotional…

The funny thing that I learned is that the rank and file liberal male really does think Kavanaugh is a serial rapist. I ran into a group of guys from Northern California who described themselves as liberal Republicans. They really wanted me to know they were sick to their stomach about what was happening in Washington, especially with what Trump is doing to the Republicans party. They really seemed to be convinced that Kavanaugh spends his nights stalking and raping middle-aged white women

It’s an odd form of virtue signalling, because it has no audience. I asked one of them why he bothers being in a party that opposes everything he supports, when he could join the other party. California is a one party state now, for the most part. It’s an obvious question that they apparently did not consider, but they did not like me asking it. I suspect this type has been doing the concern troll act for so long it is as much a part of who they are as breathing and walking upright. They no longer realize it is a pose…

At dinner one night I was seated next to a young guy and he revealed that he had an interest in the human sciences. We talked a bit and he was floored to hear that I did not think environment has much to do with how you turn out. I was surprised at first, given that he is bright and has an interest in the subject, but then I remembered that he is of a generation that has been immersed in the blank slate theology. I did my best to red pill him on some things, but the presence of heresy vexed him greatly. I felt like Lucifer…

For a long time I resisted going to things like AmRen or Mencken because I imagined them to be academic conferences full of old racists. It was not the latter that worried me, but the former. I don’t like conferences. There’s something old fashioned and dated about how they are organized. I’ve been in the workplace for three decades now and the business conference has not changed much, in terms of organization. The same is true of the academic conference. It’s still 1950’s America with these things.

That said, there is no replacing in-person interaction. You inevitably learn things about people that makes it possible to see them in three dimensions. The internet and telephone don’t allow for that. One event I attended seemed to get that aspect and built the thing around the socializing, rather than building the social elements around the event. It was quite effective as it not only felt more modern, but allowed to people to customize the event to their tastes. The result was a much more relaxed and enjoyable experience.

What occurred to me though is the old style business or academic conference was built on the assumption that you had a social life outside of your professional life. Men had families. Women had kids. People gained their social happiness outside of their work life, so at a conference, it needed to be all business. Today, people work longer, travel more and have disorderly personal lives. Work events are often the times when they get to socialize and relax. Old world America would not recognize us now…

Phoenix Arizona is the least authentic place on earth, I think. In fact, most of the Southwest, including California, feels like the QVC of cultures. Everything is new and everything is clean, relative to the east coast. That said, there is something to say for everything being new and in good working g order. Streets without craters is something we don’t have here in Lagos. You can’t beat the weather, which is why so many Boomers moved there, but I like four seasons, so I will stay on the coast I think…

I talked to a guy about California. I mentioned that half the state does not speak English and he responded by claiming the economy depends on Mexican immigrants. I did not challenge him on it, as there would have been no point. I mention it as a reminder that lots of white people still believe the open borders mythology, because they still think the point of life is increasing the GDP. They will literally sacrifice themselves and their posterity to the the economy god. A lifetime of worship is hard to overcome…

I was drinking with some guys who were very nice and very Midwestern. I noticed that they went to great pains to correct me when I said “black” instead of “African-American”, which I found rather annoying. No black people use that ridiculous phrase, unless they are around whites. Eventually they stopped and after a few drinks one asked me why I used the term black. He asked in a hushed voice like he was asking me for drugs. I told him that black people prefer black so I use black. He was quite shocked to hear it.

I’ve run into this a lot and it is a good reminder that most white and especially liberal white people, have no clue about how black people live and think. Blacks have become objects of worship or objects of fear. Even in the South, this cultural distance is starting to creep in as they are whipped into conformity by the dominant culture. The people who talk the most about race relations, know the least about it and they have the least humanity toward black people. In the future, old racists will be the last friend of the black man…

The Civil War

Posted on by
123

Something the old paleocons recognized in the 1980’s, was that the new conservatism of Bill Buckley was doomed to fail, because it started from the premise that the current political arrangements were legitimate. Since the Left had defined those arrangements in the 20th century, it meant the New Right was going to become corrupted by its willingness to operate within the Progressives rules. For example, if you agree that segregation is evil, there are only a narrow set of policy positions you can support with regards to race.

That is, of course, exactly what happened. Instead of being a moral philosophy that stood in opposition to Progressivism, it became a foil. Conservatives were the controlled opposition, who gave legitimacy to left-wing ideas by opposing them and then ultimately embracing them. If you embrace the premise, you inevitably embrace the ends. The debate is about the middle part. It’s why conservatives have spent decades trying to accomplish the goals of the Left, without embracing the means of the Left.

In the context of the Cold War, this debate between the Left and Right, was mostly about economics and foreign policy. As much as the conservatives tried to paint the Left as a bunch of Bolsheviks, the Right never seriously challenged the Left on socialist policies like public pensions, socialized medicine and anti-poverty programs. Similarly, the approach to the Soviets was a debate about how to best manage it. The exception was Reagan’s talk of roll back, but that was mostly rhetoric. He was more than willing to bargain with them.

That’s something to keep in mind with the battle over what will come to oppose the latest iteration of Progressivism. The Ben Shapiro types who are endlessly punching Right by demanding America be defined as an idea, rather than a place and people, are embracing the main argument of the Left. They have different notions of what those ideas mean and how they should be implemented, but fundamentally Ben Shapiro agrees with the Left that America, or any nation for that matter, is just a set of ideas, not a place and people.

This new conservatism must end the same way as Buckley conservatism ended. That is, as an amen chorus for the Progressive state. If you agree that the new definition of a nation is post-national, as in not being defined by borders, language and people, then the debate is what defines the new state. If you further agree that the new state is defined by ideas and a set of values, then the only thing left is to figure out who defines those ideas and how will they be enforced. Eventually, an agreement is reached.

This notion of the state as a post-national, post-Christian theocracy is not without real consequences. It may seem ridiculous, but when the people in charge believe in something, no matter how absurd, the people pay the price. You see that in the Kavanaugh fight. Big shot intellectuals are starting to notice what people on this side of the great divide have been saying for years. If society is defined by “who we are” then someone who dissents must be excluded from that society, by force, if necessary.

In that context, splitting the difference could no longer be passed off as moderation. It was cowardice. Any Republican who voted against Kavanaugh (and, of course, any Democrat who voted for him) would thereby exit his party. Just as the congressional vote in 1846 on the so-called Wilmot Proviso revealed that the fault-line in American politics was about slavery, not party, the Kavanaugh nomination shows what American politics is, at heart, about. It is about “rights” and the entire system that arose in our lifetimes to confer them not through legislation but through court decisions: Roe v. Wade in 1973 (abortion), Regents v. Bakke in 1979 (affirmative action), Plyler v. Doe in 1982 (immigrant rights), and Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 (gay marriage). The Democrats are the party of rights. As such, they are the party of the Supreme Court. You can see why Ted Kennedy claimed in a 1987 diatribe that the Yale law professor Robert Bork would turn the United States into a police state. For Democrats, an unfriendly Supreme Court is a threat to everything.

That means the country itself. The general Democratic view that has hardened since the 1960s is the one expressed on many occasions by Barack Obama. The United States is not a country bound by a common history or a common ethnicity—it is a set of values. That is an open, welcoming thing to build a country around. But it has a dark side, and we have seen the dark side during the hearings. If a country is only a set of values, then the person who does not share what elites “know” to be the country’s values is not really a member of the national community and is not deserving of its basic protections, nice guy though he might otherwise be. Such people “belong” to the country in the way some think illegal immigrants do—provisionally.

Back at the founding, opponents of the new Constitution argued that the new political model would inevitably result in the supremacy of the court. Anti-federalists argued that the Supreme Court, as defined under the Constitution would become a source of massive abuse. Beyond the power of the executive, the court would eventually come to dominate the legislative branch. This is exactly where we find ourselves today, where both sides of the ruling elite view the court as the only source of legitimate moral authority.

That’s why the Kavanaugh fight was so vicious. Progressives fear the court could define “who we are” in such a way that excludes them. It’s also why guys like Ben Shapiro are not just wrong, but dangerously wrong. By going along with the general premise of a country being just a set of values, he is committing suicide on your behalf. He has a place to go if things don’t work out here. If the definition of “who we are” turns out to not include you, where are you going to go? More important, where are they going to send you?

That’s why this new notion of the state can only end in horror. Since the Greeks, political philosophy has assumed that a society is a group of related people, with a shared history and shared space. The debate was over how best to organize society, to match the temperament and character of the people. This new model allows no room for debate and no tolerance of dissent. Like every totalitarian ideology, it has to end in a bloodbath as the fight to define “who we are” results in the pruning of those who are deemed “not us.”

The Survivor

Posted on by
134

Something that has gone unremarked in the latest outburst of female hysteria is why these purple-faced rage-heads we see on television and on social media, call themselves survivors. The word turns up in all of their materials and their self-descriptions. It’s clear the word has taken on a spiritual meaning, imbue with sacred properties. The survivor, they insist, is incapable of error or dishonesty. We must not only believe survivors, we have to follow their orders. To do otherwise violates some unexplained, yet sacred code.

The first thing that comes to mind is the literal aspect. What it is they have survived? The claim is they are survivors of sexual assault, which is a strange thing to say since no one actually dies from sexual assault. The law defines assault as “an intentional act by one person that creates an apprehension in another of an imminent harmful or offensive contact.” Therefore, sexual assault is the credible threat of unwanted sexual contact by someone with the present ability to do it, but not the act itself. That’s a different crime.

No one dies from a threat, so the idea of being a survivor of a sexual assault, at least in the narrow sense of the law, is a bit ridiculous. Most likely though, these women are using “assault” colloquially, as in a physical attack. Even so, this has two problems. One is no one dies from sexual assault as currently defined. Even rape is non-lethal. The victim could die from the physical encounter that preceded or followed the actual rape itself, but we have moved into a realm of crime no one includes in the definition of sexual assault.

If we are to take them seriously, we have to stick with present reality when defining sexual assault. In the current age, sexual assault means anything from a dirty joke to a woman being pressured into sex. Somewhere in that range is the woman who got knee-walking drunk and woke up with her panties on her head. Even allowing for the alleged trauma that ensues, these are not things one survives. It’s like saying you survived a parking ticket or a rainy week of vacation. Sexual assault is something you endure and move on.

The other problem is the concept of survival is not passive. It is active, which is why people get applause for things like surviving a ship wreck or fighting off a shark attack at the beach. It was not dumb luck, at least not exclusively, that saved the person. They fought for their life in order to overcome the threat and live. Exactly no one has died from being hit on by the boss, so you don’t get special credit for having endured it until you found a new job or the guy got canned for being a creepy perv in the workplace.

That may sound monstrously indifferent, but that is the point of examining something objectively. An objective view of what we are seeing, therefore, must include the very real and very intense emotion we see from these women. The purple-faced shrieking does not validate their claims, but it does suggest they really believe this stuff. They truly believe they have gone through some transcendent ordeal, a purifying trial that has altered them in ways that only those who have experienced it can understand and appreciate.

That’s the clue as to what may be going on here. Purification rituals are common to religions in all times and all places. For example, baptism, according to the Catholic Church, is the ritual through which we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God and members of the Church. Conversion to Judaism requires full immersion in a Mikveh, a ritual purification bath connected to a natural spring. In the Greco-Roman world, the mystery religions were those that required initiation of some kind.

We have in modern times the phrase “trial by fire” which we understand to mean a potentially lethal ordeal that also purifies the survivor. They come out the other end of the experience, changed by it in way that can only happen through such an ordeal. Soldiers, for example, who experience heavy combat are assumed to have been changed by the experience. The assumption is the act of survival requires skills and deeds that are otherwise never required. The survivor therefore gains special knowledge as a result.

Within the Progressive coalition, various tribes have creation myths that hinge on the concept of the survivor. American Jews have turned the holocaust into something that dwarfs the flight from Egypt. Integral to what it means to be a Jew has always meant survival. God’s chosen people are always under assault, but they survive because they are God’s chosen people. Surviving the Nazis not only bestows special status on the victims, but it feeds into the sense of Jewish identity as a people under assault.

Black have a similar origin myth. Like the Jews, they were in bondage, but unlike the Jews they never fled oppression. Instead, they were transferred to a different form of oppression in the form of institutional discrimination and segregation. Their survival as a race and their ongoing fight for freedom is what defines blackness in America. The “black body” stuff that turns up in Afrocentric literature is a mystical implementation of the assertion that blacks are under constant physical threat and what defines them is the fight against that threat.

White women find themselves at a loss to match blacks and Jews in terms of victim status. The concept of intersectionality is an effort to become victims by proxy. Since the only thing white women have to complain about is white men lusting after them, they have to find something else. For a long time, feminists have been trying to compare their “struggle” with that of blacks and Jews, but it is a tough sell. Comparing Becky’s struggle to get that promotion, with slavery or the holocaust, does not go over well.

That seems to be where the “I’m a survivor” stuff comes into the mix. Claiming special victim status because your great grandfather had to ride in the back of the bus does not hold up to someone claiming they were assaulted last week. For Jewish women this is like hitting the lottery. They get to remind everyone that they lost family they never knew in the camps, but now they can say Haven Monahan grabbed their boob at a college party. So far, black women have not jumped on this, but maybe that is a bridge too far.

In other words the anger being directed at normal people by these enraged women probably has nothing to do with the rest of us. It is a battle within the Progressive cult over status within the cult. Brett Kavanaugh was just a convenient prop to be used in what amounts to a morality play. That’s the other side of it. This drama allows people in the audience to display their piety, by how they react to the show being staged. It’s why white and Jewish male Progressives have been falling all over themselves in support of this.

The Revolutionary Man

Posted on by

Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin is credited with coining the phrase “war on women” in 1989, when she first used the phrase in a book introduction. Perhaps sensing she had something useful, she later used it in a book title. Democrat politicians have used it ever since to gaslight single female voters. Given the life of Mx. Dworkin, it is no surprise that the phrase is one of those fine examples of the Opposite Rule of Liberalism. The actual war on women has always been from the cult-Marx radicals of feminism.

In other words, just because the war on women, as described by slovenly feminists like Mx. Dworkin, is a fiction, it does not mean there is not a war on women. In fact, the main thrust of the cult-Marx war on white society has been a war on white women, convincing them that their role in society is illegitimate. Not only is the role of wife and mother immoral, it is a tool used by the patriarchy, by which they mean white culture, to prevent women from reaching their full potential. Feminism was called women’s liberation for a reason.

Sex roles in a society are never about one sex. The roles of men and women are complimentary. When one changes even a tiny a bit, the other much change. It’s why the Saudis are so cautious about changing their rules on women. It’s not because they hate women, as loony feminist would have you believe. It is because they fear setting off a chain reaction that would destroy men and women. After all, generations of enforcing a set of rules on the sexes has shaped how men see themselves and each other too.

An example of this in our society is in this story about a pornographer in Florida, who is accused of being sexist. The idea of a pornographer being accused of exploiting women, in the context of modern feminism, strikes most people as an amusing bit of irony. Every day we are being treated to increasingly absurd claims by overwrought females, about how they were done wrong by some mean man. Until the Kavanaugh fiasco, the idea of doing this to a pornographer probably struck most people as the limit of the absurd.

Put that aside and consider the morality at play here though. According to feminist dogma, being a pornographer is fine, as long as he respects the choices made by the women he films having sex.  Similarly, a woman degrading herself on camera, for the amusement of desperate men, is a celebration of feminism, as long as the “sex worker” does so of her own free will and has “control of her body”, whatever that means. In other words, morality has been so deformed it now champions prostitution as a celebration of female liberation.

Pornography, of course, is as old as human society, most certainly older than human settlement. Prostitution is cheekily called the world’s oldest profession, because it has existed wherever settled people existed. Human societies everywhere have had to find a way to both accept the permanence of this reality, but also curtail it in order to maintain the social conditions necessary for the people to flourish. The balance struck is slightly different in all cultures, but the practice always falls outside of what is considered moral.

The thing that is stunning, though, about that story of the Florida pornographer, is the shameless way he goes about his business. He agreed to have a documentary done about him, believing it was good for his image. He is more than happy to talk with the media and let the world know his name and location. Within my lifetime, people in the pornography business tried to conceal their activity and hide from public view, because the public would not tolerate it. The pornographer lived in fear of men.

That’s an important point deliberately erased from the record. Laws governing things like pornography were not imposed on the public by puritanical rulers. They were in response to the threat by men to hang the sorts of people who preyed on young girls, grooming them for lives of prostitution and pornography. By relegating this stuff to a protected fringe, it satisfied the demands of men to protect their women, but also kept the streets from being littered with the corpses of degenerates. It’s that balance that must always be struck.

Today, “porn king” Riley Reynolds is not only free to go about his business in the public square, he is celebrated for it. Feminism was a war on women to emasculate men, so that they would be indifferent to degenerates like Riley Reynolds. As much as modern white men complain about modern white women, a big part of why women are acting as they do is that men are no longer willing to guard their women. If a group of guys dragged Riley Reynolds out of his house and hung him from a tree, more than a few women would cheer.

This is where the men’s rights crowd and the pickup artists got it all wrong. The answer to the degeneracy of feminism is not sullen indifference or craven opportunism. The solution to feminism is for men to get back to policing their own ranks, by enforcing codes of conduct that leave women no choice but to fulfill their natural roles. If white people are going to survive, it will be in a world in which guys like Riley Reynolds are found dead in a ditch. It’s a world where Roosh V lives in fear of men, not in fear of women.

That was always the insidiousness of feminism. It was never really about women. It was always about undermining Western societies by emasculating the men. A society where the men are unwilling to protect their daughters from pornographers, too timid to fight back against Pakistani rape gangs, is a defeated society. Men who wait for someone else to protect their women will never find the courage to fight against their masters. When men on our side get that and begin to enforce a moral code on other men, the revolution begins.

Fascism And Bolshevism

Posted on by

Everyone reading this has been indoctrinated in the cult of anti-fascism, where Hitler is a mysterious super-villain, with magical powers. The Nazis are a hyper-efficient military machine designed to kill all that is good in the world. It borders on the ridiculous, but it has been effective in establishing fascism as the worst evil imaginable. There’s not much worse than being called a Nazi, other than having been an actual Nazi. Outside of prison, Nazis are considered the worst thing possible, even worse than child molesters.

On the other hand, Bolshevism has never been given the same treatment, despite the body count. The Nazis killed a lot of people, but the Bolsheviks were every bit as murderous. In fact, Stalin was vastly more efficient at killing the inconvenient. His policy of starving the Ukrainians killed more people than Hitler’s death camps and it did so much more efficiently. Not only that, the Bolsheviks exported their murderous ideology all over the world, causing tens of millions of deaths. Maybe more than 100 million.

Yet, you can be an open Bolshevik and there is no punishment for it. On every college campus in the 1980’s, for example, you could find clubs for Marxism, various forms of third world communism and even pro-Soviet organizations. Of course, hipsters have been sporting Che Guevara gear for decades. Guevara was not just a murderer and a communist, he was an over the top racist. He really hated blacks. Read his diary and even David Duke would squirm over some of the things Guevara said about blacks.

Anti-fascism evolved from an academic fetish among Frankfurt School members into a cult of sorts in the 60’s and 70’s. The Antifa loons of today are well within the tradition of prior anti-fascist loons. The puzzle is why no similar movement ever started in response to the Soviet atrocities. Even if you think the Nazis were worse than the commies, in terms of intensity, the Bolsheviks were around a lot longer. They also managed to kill, or cause to be killed, millions around the world. The commies were a global killing machine.

Why is the former the symbol of evil, while the latter is still popular?

The anti-Semites argue that the reason the Bolsheviks get a pass is that Jews invented communism and Jews now run the world. It is certainly true that Jews are, as a group, politically radical and opposed to Western traditions. It’s also true that Jews were wildly over represented in Marxist movements, including Bolshevism. Having won the ideological war with fascism, it made a lot of sense for Jews in America to use the Nazis as a lever to pry open the doors of the ruling class. Self-interest made fascism the great villain.

The fatal flaw in this theory though is that while it explains why anti-fascism remains a powerful force in the West, it does not explain why Bolshevism gets a pass. Stalin turned on the Jews in 1948, when he saw how his Jewish subjects responded to Golda Meir and the establishment of Israel. When 50,000 Jews showed up in Moscow to cheer their new ambassador Stalin decided he had a Jewish problem. From that point until the end of the Cold War, Jews in the communist bloc were subjects of official repression.

There’s another problem and that is the assertion Jews have the power to bewitch and beguile the masses. Even accounting for their exceptionalism, Jews are still 2% of the American population. Unless they are a race of super smart aliens with the ability to control minds, like the John Carpenter film The Live, it’s unlikely that they have controlled the debate for 60 years. If they are a race of super intelligent aliens from beyond the stars, we will never know it, so there is no point in contemplating that option.

Paleocons, like Paul Gottfried, have suggested that communism may have an appeal to Christians that fascism lacks. That is, communism in the abstract is inclusive, universal and egalitarian. These are concepts that you find in Christianity, at least in the general sense. Anyone can become a Christian and everyone is equal before God. The Social Gospel sounds a lot like neo-Marxism and post-colonial socialism. Liberation Theology in South America is explicitly Marxist. The current Pope is out of this movement.

The problem here, of course, is that, in Europe, the Latin countries were explicitly Catholic and fascist. In fact, some scholars argue that fascism is an outgrowth of Catholic ideas like corporatism and localism. Spain under Franco was both Catholic and fascist. Portugal under Salazar was also Catholic and fascist. Of course, Mussolini’s Italy was very popular with American Progressives until the outbreak of the war. The best you can argue is that fascism seems to have had less appeal to Protestant academics that Bolshevism.

The elephant in the room is that this argument connecting communism with Christianity is made almost exclusively by Jewish anti-communists. This could simply be an example of the strange lack of self-awareness among Jews. That is, they are instinctively trying to shift the focus from their coreligionists, who are wildly over represented in Bolshevism, by laying the blame on Christians. All the best Christmas songs are written by Jews, so maybe they know something about how to sell this to Christians. Who knows.

The fact is, the anti-Semitic and philo-Semitic arguments explaining the popularity of Bolshevism versus the demonization of fascism, don’t hold up under scrutiny. Both answers have some truth to them, but they don’t provide a complete answer. A big reason is that no one, especially anti-fascists, can provide a workable definition of fascism. In the book Fascism: The Career of a Concept, the aforementioned Paul Gottfried does an excellent job explaining the various and contradictory definitions of historical fascism.

This is why conservatives fall for the “liberals are the real Nazis” stuff peddled by grifters like Dinesh D’Souza and Jonah Goldberg. Fascism is a poorly defined political movement that can mean just about anything at this point. Even in the interwar period, the various fascist movements had some things in common, but they also had things in common with the Bolsheviks. After decades of anti-fascist proselytizing, fascism is simply a catch-all term for that which the Left currently finds upsetting or threatening.

As is often the case, the reason for the relative cultural positions of Bolshevism and fascism is due as much to serendipity as anything else. For example, Frankfurt School anti-fascism came packaged with the claim that America was a proto-fascist state, which made it attractive to European academics looking for a reason to oppose their new conquerors. Before long, the provincial clod-hoppers from the American academy were getting in on the trend. Anti-fascism became a fashionable pose for the bourgeois radicals.

It was also a useful dodge for leftists who could shift the focus from their own unreliability in the Cold War onto their critics, by calling them fascists. It’s a good example of how immediacy can have a far greater impact on societal evolution that design. The Frankfurt School types never seemed to contemplate the role of the pseudo-intellectual poser, but their critiques set off a chain of events leading to anti-fascism becoming a handy weapon for feckless airheads and preening popinjays to gainsay their opponents.

Another interesting twist is that the current fad of anti-fascism is probably the primary driver of the new anti-Semitism. Younger people have no emotional attachment to the events in Europe a century ago. The leftist street bullies and campus enforcers have managed to make anti-anti-fascism attractive. This has opened the door to old fascist writers and thinker that have been memory-holed for generations. Julius Evola has probably sold more books in the last ten years than in the previous fifty.

Even more critically, modern anti-fascism has made the corresponding generation of Jews reckless and stupid. The social media meme “fellow white people” is the sort of thing that never would have been noticed without the anti-fascist hysteria. Previous generations of Jews were more circumspect, careful to avoid publicly living the stereotype. Younger Jews, caught up in anti-fascism as hipster cause, have managed to define themselves as an absimiliated alien tribe, with a chip on their shoulder about white people.

Given that the West is well into a post-industrial age where intellectual capital is the means of production, it is long past time for these industrial age ideologies to disappear, but we are also in the post-Christian age. People have to believe in something, even if it is opposition to something that has not existed for three generations. Similarly, opposition to the hauntology of anti-fascism, is providing a breeding ground for a new politics and a new metaphysics that exists outside the strictures of prevailing orthodoxy.

The Wisdom Of The Ad Men

Posted on by

Last night I watched an NFL football game for the first time in so long I don’t recall the last time I watched a full game. I did watch a game this year on Balkan television. It may have been in Bulgarian or possibly Croatian. I don’t speak either language, I just knew it was a feed from a Balkan country. It was entertaining for the short time I watched, mostly for the commercials. From what I could tell, the people in the Balkans who watch American football really enjoy casino gambling and drinking brightly colored cocktails by the pool.

It used to be that you could tell a lot about the audience for a show or time slot by watching the commercials. After all, the people buying ad time want to market to the demographic that will buy their product. Years ago when I was between jobs, I found myself staying up late and I noticed the ads were mostly for products popular with senior citizens. That’s when I discovered that retired people often keep odd hours. If you don’t have a reason to get up early, you have no reason to go to bed early, so a lot of old people stay up late.

The ad last night that got me thinking about this was a DirecTV spot where two little Aztecs are running a lemonade stand. What looked like a Hispanic women walks up and asked for a cup of lemonade. The mother of the Aztecs jumps in and gives the woman all of the lemonade. The scene flips to the mother and her children in Raider gear on the couch cheering a football game. Apparently, the people of DirecTV think the audience for NFL games is in large part composed of single Aztec mothers living in America.

The ad that almost had me turning it off and picking a different topic for the post today was one for a NBC TV show. This was for a show called SUV and it appears to feature screeching middle aged hens. In the episode they were hyping, the hens were about to arrest a government official for kidnapping migrant children on the border. Yeah, these lunatics really believe that stuff. What are the odds that screeching harpies are watching football? Obviously, it is just the network slipping agit-prop into the broadcast for spite.

Now, I think most of us have figured out at this stage that commercial ads are just as much about selling the anti-white as about selling product. In fact, it is clear that many of the ads are only about selling degeneracy. There was an ad for American Express featuring two gay guys playing house. A BMW ad had a short clip of couples kissing and one of the couples was two hairy guys. The people creating these ads certainly know that the viewers find this stuff revolting, but they do it anyway, again suggesting it is spite.

On the other hand, I noticed something strange in the car ads. There were high production ads for BMW, Mercedes and the new Audi A7. An NFL audience seems like an unlikely place for selling luxury German sedans. You can’t walk out of a Mercedes dealership without spending sixty grand on a car they use for taxis in Europe. The Audi they were hyping starts at seventy grand, which means the typical model is in the eighties. I’m sure some luxury car owners love football, but my bet is most fans like pickup trucks more.

The thing is though, those ads were early in the game, but then they gave way to the ads for the networks degenerate programming and then later to ads for domestic cars and fast food products. Maybe the agit-prop makers have learned that upscale people will watch a little of the game then move on so they beam ads at the cackling hen demo early and then they switch over to the core audience that will stick with the whole game. After all, lots of middle aged single white women pretend to love football and motorcycles.

The hilarious part to me was the halftime show. It featured the CivNat dream team of three well-spoken black guys. You can be sure that the audience for Ben Shapiro was trying to get selfies of themselves in front of the TV screen during halftime. That’s where you see the genius of the marketing men. Whites in America are like trained seals when it comes to the heroic black guy. It’s why Candace Owens will become very rich simply by tweeting about how much she loves Donald Trump. It’s like taking candy from babies.

Another funny thing you see in the ads is the companies peddling some technology concept have the super smart black guy as the spokesman. You would think they would go with an East Asian or a South Asian, since most people are used to those guys working in the company IT department. Instead, it is the sort of black guy no one has ever seen on earth. He’s a bookish looking mulatto, who is glib and confident. Sightings of Big Foot are more common than black guys running IT departments and far more plausible.

It is tempting, of course, to say that it is just another example of how out of touch the Cloud People are about who is watching television. The reality is though, the ad men know their audience. Whites in America are fully immersed in anti-white hatred. In fact, it is the civic religion of white people now. It is the reason they gobble up shows featuring blacks in traditional white roles. Civic nationalism is just a suicide note. Most white people think the glorious future will not include them because it should not include them.

It’s why howling about the volcano demon, while amusing, is counter productive. The response from the typical white person is to bark out some version of “what about Ben Shapiro.” He’s popular for the same reason ads with race mixers are popular. You can’t change those minds by confirming what they have been trained to believe. The game is to sow doubt and confusion about the joys of diversity into the mind’s of the typical white person, getting them to question why they feel good about seeing those ads on TV.

That’s the thing you see with these ads. The first task of the ad maker is to create a positive image. The happy black man with the white wife and caramel colored kids, juxtaposed to the gloomy old white guy is not going to sell the gloomy old white guys in the audience, but it well see the white women. People on our side need to come to terms with the fact that reason is never a winning approach. No one has ever been talked out of their religion. They have a crisis, lose faith and then find a church that makes them happy.

A Rotten Elite

Posted on by

Long before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the Roman Republic stopped being a serious political entity.  The system was still a well thought out and conceived system of governance, but the people operating could no longer be trusted to operate it. The Roman political class could no longer trust itself, because the political class was no longer dominated by serious men. The proof of that was not just its collapse, but the fact that men like Marius and Sulla existed and needed to exist in order for the system to stagger on.

The old line about people getting a government they deserve always comes up whenever someone points out the defects of democracy. It’s circular reasoning but an effective way of not addressing the real issue. That is, a people with a capable ruling elite can get along and be happy with just about any form of political system. A people who need the restraint of democracy or a strong constitution to tame their ruling classes is a people with a ruling class incapable of operation a constitutional government and abiding by its limits.

What this means is the people don’t get the government they deserve, so much as they get the government their ruling class deserves. Even that does not explain why it is that the ruling elites of a society can go rotten within a generation or two. The human capital of America in the 18th century was certainly different than that of today. The ruling elite it produced was very different from today. But, the population of America a century ago was not that much different than today. We’re a little browner, but materially much better off.

As the circus of the Kavanaugh confirmation unfolds, it is important to note that the people creating the circus are not the brown ones. Sure, they were the opening acts, but the main stage is populated with geezers produced by the ruling class of a half century ago. Diane Feinstein is the representative of a the generations that produced the cultural revolution of the 1960’s, not someone from the current age. In other words, the American ruling class started going sour a long time ago. We’re just getting to smell the rotting corpse of it.

You have to wonder if if events like this are what gives the remaining serious men the idea of toppling over the system. In the Roman Republic, the one place where merit counted was in the military. There were plenty of politics, of course, but ultimately a man was what he showed on the field of battle. Read accounts of Caesar in Gaul and the man was not just a great general. He was a lion on the field. While there were plenty of old men in the Roman senate who served their time in the legions, none were the equal of Cesar.

No matter how sophisticated a society, men judge other men by the simple calculation of whether they can take them in a fight. You have to think that the men running the military look over at their civilian leadership and wonder why they are taking orders from clowns like they see in the Senate. This must be especially true of the junior officers, most of whom by this point have done tours in Afghanistan and the Middle East. As patriots, they have to be looking at the civilian leadership with nothing but contempt.

That’s not to say we are about to have a military coup. It’s always possible, but the one place where civic nationalism is strongest is within the military. The one place where multicultural lunacy is strongest is within the senior leadership ranks of the services. The civilian leadership remains cautious enough to make sure the top brass of the military are just as feckless and craven as the civilian side. Even there though, the ingredients are in place for a young and ambitious officer to start thinking about a short cut to the top.

Putting the military coup aside, watching the Kavanaugh circus should be a reminder that America is one serious crisis away from collapse. The financial crisis of 2008 was so terrifying to the elites, because they sense the fragility of their position. The central bankers were able to contain it and limit the damage to the public, by pushing the costs off into the future. The US debt now stands at $21.4 trillion for a reason, but you can only charge off the costs of a crisis so many times. At some point, the elites must act.

It’s clear that the political elite of America is incapable of handling a genuine crisis. They struggle to do the basics of government now. They still have not written and passed a budget for next fiscal year. This is ground floor stuff. If they cannot handle the simplest of tasks, how will the “world’s greatest deliberative body” manage to debate a response to a genuine crisis? The answer, of course, is they won’t because they can’t. Instead, they will look around for the strong man to arrive and take over the task from them.

That’s what we are seeing with the Kavanaugh hearings. Serious men would never have allowed a handful of deranged matrons, suffering from the typical middle aged female hysteria, to disrupt this process. Generation after generation since Gettysburg, the political elite has grown weaker as the quality of the ruling elite has declined. Maybe the system is to blame. Maybe the breeding patterns of the elites are to blame. Maybe it is just an example of reversion to the mean. Either way, our elites are no longer elite.

The Cult of Neoconservatism

Posted on by

The word “cult” is a term often abused by Progressives, because it carries with it negative connotations. They like to us it to slander their enemies. Frankfurt School types convinced the world that Nazism, for example, was a cult, in order to make their case that anyone finding fascism appealing is not just mistaken, but crazy. Progressives picked up on this to brand their enemies as well. Still, it is a useful concept as the cult seems to be a feature of human behavior. We have records of cults going back to the Bronze Age.

In the modern sense, we think of a cult as having certain features, like a charismatic leader and a sense of isolation. A cult always has a set of beliefs that are so convincing to the adherents, in terms of defining their existence and their relationship to the world, that they almost seem brainwashed. It’s as if they are controlled by them. The identity of the cult and its purpose becomes the identity and purpose of the adherent. As a result they operate like an ant farm or a beehive. The suicide cult is the extreme example of this.

Neoconservatism has many of the features one would associate with a cult. The members are increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, both physically and emotionally. There is the sense of the embattled minority, ready to martyr themselves for the cause. The members seem to operate in an ideological fog, unable to recognize the massive disconnect between their beliefs and observable reality. Then you have the fact that to the neocons, their ideology is perfectly rational, but to outsiders it seems dangerously nutty.

The late great Eric Hoffer pointed out that all mass movements can get along without a god, but they always need a devil. You see that with the neocons. They don’t have the charismatic leader, like we normally associate with cults, but perhaps to the adherents, Bill Kristol is charming. Despite his unpleasant demeanor and long list of failures, they do seem to venerate him. Still, what holds the cult of neoconservatism together is their list of devils, that are all cast as a manifestation of the great authoritarian villain.

That comes through in this piece by Anne Applebaum in the Spectator. The piece is a good example of the paranoid fantasy. Mx. Applebaum is a neocon rage head, who specializes in scanning the eastern horizon for signs of Alexander III of Russia. The neocons all have an obsession with Russia that borders on the pathological, which leads many to assume it is biological. As a result, resistance to cosmopolitan globalism in the east is cast by the neocons as the return of authoritarianism and you know who.

A feature of neoconservatism that is shared by Progressive Jews is they are haunted by the thought of exclusion. Being left out is their greatest fear. This manifests as an abhorrence to limits, borders and clear definitions. This mania for formlessness has been picked up by other tribes of the Left. Feminists, for example, rage against biology, because definitions of sex are by nature exclusionary. The BLM activists toppling over statues do so because they hate whitey, but also because it is not their history.

This is why neocons favor open borders and recoil in horror at efforts to restore some sense of national unity. When the neocon thinks of borders, he thinks of fences and then starts to think about you know who. You’ll note that the the bad guys of the Visegrad are talked about by neocons as an implementation of the all-purpose bogeyman, the authoritarian Übermensch. The neocons, like liberal Jews, have this imaginary, all-purpose bogeyman, that manifests in the real world, but exists in the world for forms.

Another cult-like aspect of the neocons is their internalization of fundamentally irrational and contradictory ideas. For example, after 9/11, the neocons advocated importing millions of Muslims into the US, while at the same time advocating the bombing of Muslim homes and villages.  People can be forgiven for thinking the creation of the “home grown” terrorist, the pissed off Muslim living in the West, radicalized by US foreign policy, is intentional. To people inside the neocon cult, however, this all makes perfect sense.

What argues against calling neoconservativism a cult is how well it fits in with the other two pillars of the ruling orthodoxy. The heirs of William Bradford, with their neo-covenant theology and sense of communal salvation, fit in neatly with Progressive Jews and their paranoid fear of exclusion and anti-majoritarian animosities. Together, they domestically form the Progressive orthodoxy we see today. In a way, the neocons are a complimentary piece, that extends this mode of thought into the areas of foreign policy.

On the other hand, American Progressives are showing all the signs of devolving into a cult, with their strange siege mentality and bizarre internal logic. The fact that their pantheon of heroes are referred to by three initials may not a pointless affectation. It could be part of the ritual of sacralizing their former leaders. Perhaps the inevitable move by the neocons back to the Left, is the completion of some cosmic puzzle. Or perhaps like a UFO cult, they see it as the final piece of the cosmic puzzle, signifying the end times.

In a seriousness, there is a strong case that neoconservativism is now a cult, one based on an obsession with public policy and haunted by nightmares of the authoritarian bogeyman. Their inability to adapt to present reality, in fact they are becoming more extreme in the face of disconfirmation, is the sort of thing you expect from a cult. Perhaps it runs its course peacefully disappearing into the dustbin of history. Still, prudence suggests caution as end times cults tend to end with a bang, rather than a whimper.